How to do a five-minute daily review

Updated 2026-09-12

The short answer

Four questions, five minutes, at the end of the day rather than the start of the next one:

  1. What did I plan, and what actually happened?
  2. Where did the time actually go?
  3. What is blocked, and on whom?
  4. What are tomorrow's first three?

That is the whole thing. Its value is almost entirely in question one, because comparing planned against actual is the only mechanism by which a guess becomes an estimate.

The same two hours in four pieces produces less, because each return pays to rebuild where you were TWO HOURS, ONE BLOCK one load-in, then work TWO HOURS, FOUR PIECES the pale blocks are the reload: what was pending, what you had ruled out. They are never on any list, which is why nobody budgets for them.
The same two hours in four pieces produces less, because each return pays to rebuild where you were

Why it goes at the end of the day

You still have the information. At five o'clock you know what happened, what got in the way, and what is now waiting. Tomorrow morning you are reconstructing that from memory, badly and with a bias towards whatever is most recent.

It closes the day. Writing down where things stand is what makes it reasonable to stop thinking about them. The tasks are somewhere; they do not need to be carried home.

It sets tomorrow's first move. A morning that opens with a written first line opens with work. A morning that opens with "what should I do first?" opens with deliberation, at the hour when deliberation is most expensive. The reasoning in full.

What each question is for

Planned against actual is the engine. Not to score the day — to find where your estimates are systematically wrong. That is almost always a small, specific set of categories rather than everything: for most people one or two kinds of work are reliably underestimated and the rest are roughly fine. You cannot find that pattern without writing the estimate down first, even a poor one.

Where the time went catches the things no list records. The reload after every switch, the meeting that ran long, the forty minutes on something that was never on any plan. These are what make a day feel full and look empty, and they are invisible unless asked about directly.

What is blocked, and on whom is the highest-return question per second spent. Something waiting on another person does not move however you rank it, and the unblocking action is usually a two-minute message — best sent now, while you still remember exactly what you need. More on dependencies.

Tomorrow's first three is the output. Three, with durations, decided now rather than in the morning.

The thing that must never be in it

A verdict.

The review is an instrument reading, not an assessment. "Two of three done, the third blocked on legal, the estimate for the deck was out by an hour" is useful. "Bad day, must do better" is not information and it makes the review something you will stop doing within a fortnight.

This matters more than it sounds. A review that grades you gets avoided on exactly the days it would be most useful — the difficult ones — so the data goes missing precisely where the pattern lives. An unfinished task is unfinished. That is a description of a state, not a judgement about a person, and the distinction is what keeps the habit alive.

Making it survive

Five minutes, not twenty. A twenty-minute review is done for a week. A five-minute one is done for a year, and a year of five-minute reviews is worth far more.

Same trigger every day. Attached to something that already happens — closing the laptop, the last coffee. A habit with no trigger is an intention.

Write it somewhere you will see it tomorrow. A review whose output you never read again is a diary, not an instrument.

Skip it when the day has genuinely ended badly. Then do it the next evening. Enforcing it on a bad day is how it becomes the thing being avoided rather than the thing that helps.

Where to go next

Using this in Decide One

Decide One closes a day with done, partial or blocked — three states, because they are three different things — and shows planned against actual over weeks. Overrunning adds the time and says nothing about it.

A line you did not finish is unfinished. It is not marked against you, and a day you did not open is not counted.

Open Decide One — free to use, with no account. Nothing you write leaves your device.

Decide One is a priority instrument. Bring the day into view, choose a method, give the first thing real time.

Open it — free, nothing to sign up for

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